Extra Information

Chapter 11: Niagara SCX and SimulStream
90 ViewCast
Show N Filters per Device
With the Show N filters per device control (Figure 149) you can set up the driver to expose 1 to 10
filters per device for applications to specify and select. If, for example, you choose 4 filters per
device, device lists in applications show four entries for the current device. For device 1, the system
designates them as 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4.
Figure 149. Show Filters per Device Option
This global setting affects all the Osprey-2XX, -300, -440 or -530/540/560 devices as a group.
IMPORTANT! When you apply this change, a message box prompts you to restart the system.
You must do this. The number of filters you request do not display or work correctly until
you restart the system.
While it is possible to expose and specify up to 10 filters per device, the practical number of working
filters equates to less than this. The practical number of filters depends on:
• The capability of the system
• The types of filtering turned on in the driver
• The types of scaling and color format conversions requested in the driver
• The type of processing the downstream application performs
When you directly render video to the window, the video format and type of renderer used can make
a major difference in system performance and in the number of possible streams. If multiple capture
devices exist in the system, the number of filters equals the total across all the devices. In addition,
some types of processing, such as de-interlacing and gamma correction, performed once per device
may, in this case, occur multiple times. In summary, a high-end, multi-core, or multiprocessor, system
can support 5, 6, or more concurrent filters on one device if the processing per filter remains light;
but only 2 or 3 if the processing loads inside or outside of the driver becomes particularly heavy.
Allow Multiple Instances of Each
Filter
This control enables you to run multiple application instances on one device that does not have
device select controls.
ViewCast recommends that you do NOT allow multiple instances of each filter unless you have a
specific need for it. Turning it on affects some of the above description. Specifically, you cannot
keep crop, watermark, and caption settings separately for applications sharing a filter, and might
confuse and interfere with each other. The most recent crop, watermark, or caption setting